Balzac's Lives

(Paperback)

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Enter the mind of French literary giant Honore de Balzac with this groundbreaking biography that illuminates the writer's life and era through close study of the unforgettable characters and places in Balzac's expansive and inimitable works. Enter the mind of French literary giant Honore de Balzac through a study of nine of his greatest characters and the novels they inhabit.Balzac's Livesilluminates the writer's life, era, and work in a completely original way. Balzac, more than anyone, invented the nineteenth-century novel, and Oscar Wilde went so far as to say that Balzac had invented the nineteenth century. But it was above all through the wonderful, unforgettable, extravagant characters that Balzac dreamed up and made flesh-entrepreneurs, bankers, inventors, industrialists, poets, artists, bohemians of both sexes, journalists, aristocrats, politicians, prostitutes-that he brought to life the dynamic forces of an era that ushered in our own. Peter Brooks's Balzac's Lives is a vivid and searching portrait of a great novelist as revealed through the fictional lives he imagined.

Reviews

At the heart of Peter Brookss new book on Balzac lies an intense competition between two opposite kinds of writing: Criticism and the Novel. The authors goalto show us how Balzacs Human Comedy makes sense of human and social naturebelongs to Criticism, but his meanswriting biographies of Balzacs characters, mere figments of imaginationare pure Novel. Though these twice-told tales are amply interleaved with critical and social context, narrative analysis and psychoanalytic insight, the contest between critical reading and novelistic telling hardly ends in a draw. Brooks not only likes a good story, he knows how to tell one, expert in retracing even the most tortuous paths of Balzacs human comedians. The inordinate, almost fierce energy that animates every line here is the passion of a storytellerthat primal passion for staging twists and turns of plot, for entering and projecting into imaginary lives, for using these lives to reflect on love, sex, money, power, identity. Small wonder Peter Brooks teaches us so much in Balzacs Lives; hes learned Balzacs lesson. D. A. Miller

Balzacs Lives is, among other things, an attempt to rectify the benign neglect from which Balzac currently suffers. Brookss book is not about any one work, or even any one theme. It is about the human dimension of the vast Balzacian universe. . . . A literary study that reads like a novel and whose unabashed aim is to get its readers to read more Balzac once theyve finished. Elena Comay del Junco, Los Angeles Review of Books

Peter Brookss entire body of work has been devoted to finding a way of talking about literature that is analytically rigorous but lucid, eloquent, useful (one of his favorite words), andin the best sensesocial. Balzacs Lives is the brilliant culmination of his approach. I found this world-besotted bookespecially now, self-quarantined as we areimmensely moving. David Shields

Anyone interested in Balzac should pounce on this book, at once erudite and wonderfully readable, and keep it close at hand. Peter Brooks displays in these pages a dizzying knowledge of his work. Through the life of various characters, he leads the reader towards an unusual biography of the novelist for whom the world he invented was more real than life. It takes a steady hand to guide one into Balzacs vast and complicated world and make sense of a passionate and complex man. Peter Brooks provides it with ease and elegance. Anka Muhlstein

As I read the book, I enjoyed Brookss sharp insights, which suggest the ways in which Balzacs proto-modern world is not so different from our own. But I also felt a more basic, visceral pleasure. Naomi Fry, The New Yorker

Author Bio

Peter Brooks has been teaching and writing about Honore de Balzac for many years. Among his books are the nonfiction volumes The Melodramatic Imagination, Reading for the Plot, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, Troubling Confessions, Realist Vision, Henry James Goes to Paris, and Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris, as well as two novels, World Elsewhere and The Emperor's Body. In 2014 Brooks edited a collection of Balzac's stories for New York Review Books, The Human Comedy- Selected Stories. He is the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale.